Red Sox Nation

In sports news: the Red Sox were swept from the play-offs. Good luck to any team trying to beat the dreaded Yanks. Say it with me, "Yankees suck! Yankees suck!" Thanks, I feel a bit better. In football news: the Pats lost. It was not a good weekend to be a Boston sports fan.

While I grew up playing sports - soccer, street hockey, a season of baseball, tennis, ping-pong, and a season of high school football - I was never a huge sports fan. I was never the kind of guy who could name players' stats, and I never had a poster of an athlete on my wall. I enjoy watching sports, but I don't know enough about any particular team, player or coach to support any other team but my "home" teams of New England. So even though I now live on the opposite coast, I still root for the Sox, Pats, Bruins and Celtics.

I care almost nothing for college- or high school-level sports and didn't while I was attending school, with the one exception being the ice hockey team of Boston College. It all started when a friend invited me to a hockey game while in my junior year. Up to that point I had been to several football games but had never attended a single other sports match. That year (1989-90) the BC Eagles were playing extremely well, and we were there amongst a sell-out crowd of boisterous (and probably drunk) co-eds all cheering on their team to victory. It was a great game, and it opened my eyes to how much fun I'd been missing by not attending those games. I don't think I made it to many more games that season, but I was there at every home game - and quite a few away games - during my senior year.

I was usually in attendance with my younger cousin Ray and his friend Jay. Jay was actually a year older than me and was originally friends with my older cousin, but Ray "inherited" him through their mutual love for sports. And, as it turned out, their mutual love for yelling highly-emotional and - at times - highly-inappropriate things at the games. I admit that my blood gets pumping when I watch sports, but the most I recall yelling was an extremely loud, "You got nothin!" at the opposing team. Ray, but Jay in particular, would yell things that embarrassed and sometimes even shocked me. The one example I can think of is when a player got hurt and was lying on the ice, Jay would yell, "Drag the body off the ice!" It was as if Jay had no sense of decorum, and nothing mattered but cheering the team on to a win...at any cost. In fact, if we called him on it, he would act as if we were at fault for being pussies. The other team was the ENEMY, and it was okay to wish - loudly - that they get hurt or worse. It was only a game? Not in Jay's book: it was life or death, and you were either with him or against him.

I bring this up, not because Jay was the exception, but because Jay's behavior foreshadowed what now seems to be the norm for life in America. We live in a country with two sides - the Republicans and the Democrats - and life is just one big sporting event. You are either on our side, or you're the ENEMY.

What if we have a problem that affects everyone like the environment or health care? Doesn't matter. If you're on the other side, I don't care what you have to say. In fact, I don't want you to even have the right to say it; I just want you to shut up. Anything you have to say will simply be wrong and probably hurtful to my side. "The Republicans suck! The Republicans suck!"

Politics has become sport, with the only losers being us, the public.

The house has officially been painted - or at least, the first coat. Partner had a plan to spackle the shingles which had been scraped to bare wood, but that didn't happen before the nice weather ended. If we get a couple of nice days in a row, he might still do it, but I'm betting that we're going to leave it the way it is through the winter. The colors look nice, and if you squint, it looks fine.

Painting the Dollhouse

Partner and I are finally getting home improvements started. This past week we officially hired a contractor who will replace all the windows and do a small addition on the back of the house. He will also put in some French doors so we can more easily get to the deck. This last improvement is part of Partner's master plan to make the deck into a nice place where we can host guests and not be embarrassed.

Most importantly, we have also started painting the outside of the house. Up till this week it's been a dingy yellow with peeling paint. Now it's a latte color (tan) with a soft, grayish-green trim around the windows and a dark brown/purple accent. (The actual name of the accent color is black bean, and it resembles that quite well; in the can it looks like a very dark purple - exactly like the liquid in a can of black beans. Once it dries, however, it's hard to tell if it's purple or brown.) Today I did the front door all in the accent color, so it really draws the eye - which is good considering the fact that the house looks like it has leprosy. Which is to say that, although Partner did an admirable job power-washing the walls and trying to remove the peeling paint, many of the shingles still have paint that is half hanging off. Where the peelings were taken off, those shingles still look kinda shabby under the one coat of tan. Our goal is to put primer on those shingles that are half-peeled then cover them with another coat of the tan. A couple of weeks ago I would've said that was a pipe dream, but considering all the hard work we've been doing lately, I'd say it's now a possibility. (Forgot to mention: we weren't able to do the best scraping job on the shingles because that dingy yellow paint is lead-based, and we don't want to release all that lead dust into the air. Partner has been doing a great job collecting all the shavings that have come off so far.) Tomorrow and Monday are supposed to be fairly nice days, so more painting for us!

I had a "two worlds collide" kind of moment this past week at EarthShare, the company I volunteer for. One of the gals who work in the office asked me - apropos of nothing - if I were a big Wonder Woman fan because there was going to be some kind of event happening at the Excalibur comic book store. I said, "No, but I bet I know the guy who's putting it on." Sure enough, a family acquaintance (not close enough to be called a "friend," really) Andy Mangels is running the show. Isn't it weird when two different parts of your life intersect like that? And by the way, who knew there were that many WW fans in Portland? And the most important question of all: why did Joss Whedon stop writing the script for the movie?

Speaking of Joss, we were at a friend's place the other night, and he showed us the unaired series finale of Dollhouse which came in the blue-ray dvd set. It was so good, I almost wish the series had ended just so more people could've gotten to see that episode. It was a great reminder at just how wonderful TV can be.